Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-29-Speech-4-043"
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"en.20050929.5.4-043"2
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".
Mr President, I congratulate Caroline Lucas on her report. We have very little disagreement with the contents of the report; we have more problems with the content of her speech, which seemed not entirely to reflect the report as it stands.
I have had the opportunity to visit China recently, at the invitation of the Chinese Government, to look at developments in the country that represents a fifth of the world's population. While man does not live by bread alone, the year-on-year growth rates of 10%-plus have transformed China from the country I first knew more than 20 years ago. Even the so-called depressed north-east of the country has a skyline littered with cranes that shows a level of economic activity that would be impressive anywhere in the world. Across the country, 300 million Chinese have been pulled out of poverty, even if more than 100 million remain in the more remote rural areas living on less than EUR 1 per day.
China is succeeding in manufacturing, not by a race to the bottom, as the flourishing department stores of Harbin and Chengde prove. The result of this economic boom has transformed China into the world's fourth-largest exporter and, as we have seen in today's earlier debate, has made it extremely competitive in a number of industrial sectors.
We have to take care when dealing with those issues. As a Member of this House back in the mid-80s, when Japan played out the role that China is playing today, I saw the wrong steps being taken. The initial voluntary quotas on exports to the United States bought from the Japanese by President Nixon in exchange for the return of Okinawa to Japanese rule, later extended to Europe, led to a situation where unmet demand allowed Japanese corporations to make super-profits which, reinvested, exacerbated the problems in the long term. Instead, we need to match China's exports to Europe with our own to China.
We have to recognise that economics is starting to transform Chinese society. To echo Mr Caspary, there are a whole series of human rights and other problems. We are particularly concerned in relation to this report at the restrictions of the rights of labour activists to organise free trade unions. We hope the Commission will pressure European business operating in China to set an example by giving their own workers full trade union rights.
There are environmental problems in China, of course, and these should be addressed. We should avoid the hypocrisy of asking China to refrain from doing what we are not prepared to do ourselves in Europe. We cannot expect China to voluntarily restrict its use of energy below levels that we see in the European Union. We have to move away from crisis management of economic and trade issues as we threaten to cascade from textiles, to footwear, to bicycles and an endless sequence of other products. We need to build a serious partnership with China on economic and trade matters. If we do not, others will.
We also need a serious political dialogue with China. We have much to say to each other. This report is not the place to raise these issues, but the decision by the Foreign Affairs Committee to draft a report on EU-China political relations is to be welcomed."@en1
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